Through a partnership between the Independent Game Developers of RI (IGDA) and the United States Air Force (USAF), a presentation was held on February 26, 2013, at the New England Tech East Greenwich campus, to discuss the steps needed to produce a transitional game project for the Air Force.

New England Tech game development students, some acting as independent developers and others as co-op interns, will be working alongside more experienced independent game developers from the IGDA. The best description of the project team is a “distributed agile development team”.

The result of this work will be a variety of software prototypes that the USAF will use to test transitional games as a training platform for US Airmen worldwide.

Three USAF personnel, Major Michael Bliss, Sargent Chris Kocinski, and Sargent Kyle Stackpole were on-hand to work with the IGDA workshop team. Future meetings are scheduled given the large role our students are playing in this project. Three Quarter 11 students from NEIT’s Game Development and Simulation Programming Technology have registered to complete a co-op on this project for the next two quarters.

Special thanks to Assistant Professor David Johnson, Game Development and Simulation Programming Technology, for his efforts in coordinating this all-important program.